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Google says ‘no’ to Googling

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Google's great, yadda yadda yadda. The problem is that Google is so great that it's unique name is becoming a verb. You can now talk of googling something, or even being googled yourself. Google isn't pleased, however. The company has rolled out lawyers to keep "google" out of the dictionary, unless, that is, the dictionary makes it perfectly clear that "Google" is a trademark. The word, it seems, is going the way of Kleenex, Xerox, and Coke, and in the case of the UK & Ireland, Hoover (it still drives me nuts to hear vacuuming described as hoovering).

Paul McFedries, who runs the lexicography site Word Spy, received a stiffly worded letter from the firm after he added "google" to his online lexicon. The company asked him to delete the definition or revise it to take account of the "trade mark status of Google". He opted for the latter.

Of course, for now I suspect that when most people talk of googling, they're actually talking about using Google, not just any search engine. But if the history of language is any indicator, that won't stay true for long.

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Ken Fisher
Ken is the founder & Editor-in-Chief of Ars Technica. A veteran of the IT industry and a scholar of antiquity, Ken studies the emergence of intellectual property regimes and their effects on culture and innovation. Emailken@arstechnica.com//Twitter@kenfisher